I’m doing this week’s readings early, as I know for a fact I will forget to do this next week during Thanksgiving.

That said, DATA PRIVACY! Wheee! The first article talks about employers asking for your Facebook password. The simple answer for me is no. Or, more politely, along the lines of the first suggestion it offers, “please feel free to look at the public page the way it stands now.”

This gets me feeling like a sticky wicket. On one hand, as a social media marketer, my goal should be to bring the entire company into lockstep for the public face. That said, I really don’t want to work for Big Brother, and I would probably sue my employer for wrongful termination if they fired me based on what I said on my private page to a privately controlled group of people. Obviously public messages are a different story, but what I say in the “privacy” of my page should remain that way. The same way that a man with a window can add blinds to increase his privacy.

It occurs to me that Freedom of Speech plays into this as well, if an employer accesses my account and sees that I am a member of the private group “BUNNIES SHOULD BE EATEN!!!!” and the employer has a rabbit, was I not hired based on my beliefs?

The second article ties in more with the reading from last (two weeks) ago, with data aggregation. With so much available online about someone, how do we keep that information secure, and used properly? The Personal Data vault they suggest is a good start, but creeps me out.

A Wired article released the day of me writing this makes me increasingly nervous about my online data. Having been a victim of identity theft (it’s always fun to be woken up by Feds asking if I bought fertilizer in New York 12 hours earlier), I’ve been paying closer attention to what is online about me. I’ve actually bought a “burn phone” in cash that I use for both password recovery and as part of my passwords (10 digit phone numbers are a great addition to a password if it’s a number impossible to trace to you).

Questions for the reader:

1. Are you worried about a boss asking for your social media?

2. Are you worried about/taking steps to prevent your identity ending up online in a bad way?

This is such a cool topic, if not insanely complicated for me specifically to try to figure out. 5 exabytes of data encompasses everything we know up until 2003.

That number is swiftly going to climb. In fact, as covered in the intro to the white paper, it already has. We double that number exponentially, it seems. With the ability we have now to digitize, in high quality, almost everything that could ever happen from a billion different angles, how do we mine that data for the important information?

We don’t. Currently. The processing power would be insane. But I really like the idea that this could happen some day, using our crowdsourced data collection and using it to press all of that information together in a way that benefits us so well.

In the meantime….Search engines! Selective processing! We can take a guestimate of the data out there and work to provide a little thumbnail view of that data. The problem is we can generate hundreds of times more data these days than we could ever process as a human being, so we really need to start generating ideas for how to handle all of this data.

1. What big issues do you think could be solved just by combining and collecting all the data that’s available out there, if we could do it in the right way?

2. Random guestimate: How much data do you produce daily? Weekly? Yearly?

Message refinement falls under the tricky issue of dealing with the chicken and the egg. This week’s reading fall in with the idea that your targeted message needs to be perfectly refined and tested before deployment. Sugary beverages, for one, struck a subtle challenge because no one hadn’t tried to remove them from kids hands before. That’s a tough market to figure out, as most of the competitors had figured out long ago that all it takes to sell them iya have a pitcher full of your sweet, sweet, nectar destroy someone’s wall. ohh yea.

The problem with a lot of campaigns, though, is that its expensive to run a long research program before launching a campaign, especially in the fast paced world we live in today. I feel like it should be used sparingly.

The exceptions do exist, of course, as KFC figured out when therealized that “finger licking good” also translated to “eat your fingers off.”

Pioneers in new markets should indeed worry about the research, but do you think it’s important for everyone to worry about?

Eye tracking is something fascinating to me. I love that it’s used on Spike TV’s Bar Rescue.

I really like eye tracking because it makes design qualitative. Not normally an artist or designer, I often find myself lost when it comes to why people don’t find something visually appealing, and vice versa. But I really enjoy that eye tracking gives us the ability to figure out the most effective way to design a page based on science or numbers.

The white paper in the reading covers the reasons people focused on one link more than others, placement and reviews apparently help. This seems pretty straight forward. Giving something more space will lead to more people noticing it.

I also feel that the reason people’s views hit specific places so much is because of their familiarity. Google maps looks the same if you’re googling directions in canada, brazil, or florida. People know where to look, and trust the results of the search, so they don’t spend a lot of time hitting other results.

The results of the newspaper test also kinda hit the same feelings. Headlines get more attention, areas with the most important stories get more attention.

Personally, I think that keeping track of where people look on your page is very important, but difficult and expensive for most companies.

1. When using a desktop browser and a mobile browser, do you change where you focus on the page?

2. Given the cost and time it takes to develop and test the eye tracking of a menu, website, magazine, etc., do you think this plays a big role in marketing? Should it play a bigger one?

Crowd sourcing is such a cool idea. I’d actually read the Wired Article before, it fascinates me. I’ve actually used the idea for a leadership paper on Machiavelli, a man whose (fake, but popular) philosophy was to lead the people like sheep while telling them they were Gods. If you can harness the work effort of people in their downtimes, convince them what they are doing is fun, or entertaining, they will happily double their productivity. From creating an encyclopedia, to mapping the human genome as a video game, people can be a wonderful tool to do your work for you. Heck, it’s the reason Facebook works, zuckerburg just created a framework, and people filled in content. The same for YouTube, which current receives more videos in a day that could be watched in a year.

Given that, for simple tasks, crowd sourcing leads to correct answers, it’s a powerful tool to harness. I remember when people could “loan” their computers to different agencies that would borrow the processing power while the computer was inactive for research. If you look at people like tools, this is the exact same thing, and cool. Or dangerous. As far as the article on reporters, using iReport, or blogging, puts huge pressure on actual news organizations to report even faster, and has led to less impressive journalistic coverage than we’d see even as close as 10 years ago.

My questions:

1. If a government could find a way to make, say, air traffic control, a crowd source-able job, done via a gaming console or computer, where people were rewarded for the most efficient airplane landing pathways, and perfect records, would you feel safe? ATC is especially tricky, remember, because those controllers sit in the booths for hours, get exhausted, stress issues, etc. If we crowd sourced, someone wouldn’t know if they were actually in charge, it would pull randomly from hundreds of available options, and someone would only be in charge for an hour, or two, like they were playing a video game.

2. Could you eventually trust a large group of people working in their spare time to deliver professional quality work to situations like the one I listed in question 1?

I’ll be keeping this short, as I don’t want to ruin what is understandably palpable excitement at my presentation on wednesday. Will there be another Oregon Trail reference? A picture of the Terminator? Tune in next week.

Anyway, Reputation Management actually shares some commonality with my previous presentation on CRM. According to the reading, or more specifically the reading from AdWeek, this upcoming generation is 3 times more likely to complain about a company online. This is a huge shift in the paradigm, as the complaints are now easier to make, more public, and potentially viral. That said, only roughly half of the companies surveyed are ready or capable to reply in a meaningful way to this kind of complaint, which can lead to huge problems as far as their….are you ready for this?…reputation goes.

I’ll be covering more of the readings in greater detail during my presentation, but some questions to prime you are these:

1. Do you have a google alert set up for yourself? Have you ever googled yourself and found something negative?

Gah. My internet bumped and I lost my entire post. This is unfortunate.

QR codes! Sigh. I don’t like QR codes. I had this long, eloquent explanation as to why, but summed up below:

1. clunky, and takes up space in a design/poster

2. not universally well known

3. unusable by people without smart phones

4. unusable by people with smart phones who don’t know what to do

Effectively, I feel that this form of “offline hyperlink,” as the reading called it, takes up space on a poster that is completely unusable by parts of the audience targeted.

In the era where I can easily just ask siri to take me to a webpage. or use my upcoming google glasses to just immediately identify the information needed, I don’t see the purpose, I guess. It seems like the HD DVD, when BluRay comes out a week later, a technology left in time.

The second reading, here, goes into more detail on how the cell phone is changing the way we look at the world and at marketing, specifically related to healthcare. I read an article on Wired a while ago about how there’s an X play contest to make a “tricorder,” the Star Trek device that can diagnose without anything invasive, and is the size of a cell phone.

I think that the way we do marketing will sooner look like Minority Report or I, Robot, instead of Mad Men.

Do you think that you could trust a doctor who came in and just took a picture of you with a smart phone to diagnose?

This week, we got to play video games for a grade! Kinda. The reading this week comes from a Princeton Anthropoligist by the name of Boelstorff, who did an extended study on Second Life, a virtual world found somewhere on the tubes of the Internets. He starts off justifying his research through Malinowski, who, it’s revealed, spent a lot of time in Australia interacting with local tribes, and felt that good research took prolonged contact with the subject. Honestly, it strikes me as much the same argument I used to my Mom to justify playing Mariokart on saturday mornings instead of mowing the lawn…I was practicing for when I could drive a real car.

That may be unfair though, as this research is really interesting to me, because seeing how people interact now on Facebook, and the social rules there fascinate me. For instance…when is poking taboo? Why? Why would they add it? How can I get that stupid thing turned off?

Anyway, the reading goes on to talk about how “the real world” isn’t a true or fair antonym for “the virtual world.” This part really stuck with me. I’m very much a “define things in black or white” kind of guy, it’s why I like marketing, because you can justify this process. “We have the BEST toaster! People love our toaster! It’s the cheapest! It makes toast!” Sure, there’s thousands of ways (probably) to measure the best toaster, the variables in heating, size of bread allowed, number of toasting stations, etc. But they’ve defined their toaster as the BEST, because it’s the cheapest (which IS a way to get that binary option), and it fits the category. Marketing, at least to me, is about figuring out what people care about, and making the product the best for those parameters, or, taking those parameters and changing them so that your product fits as the best.

Verizon and ATT are a strong example, both are saying that they are the best, because of number of cell towers, faster speeds, etc, even though they both sell the same thing: service for the same iPhone 5. Does anyone else do this? Or am I crazy here?

Anyway, my experience with SecondLife may not be fair and unbiased, as my videogame preferences tend to learn toward the “frat boy” games, games that are quick, easy, and can be played with others drunk. The Modern Warfare, Halo, Mariokart kind of games. I realize that this puts me low on the “gamer” hierarchy, but oh well.

The first thing I noticed was the animation of a rather attractive woman in a very small bikini. I may need to reevaluate my thoughts. I played as a white male, because it seemed familiar to me. After downloading all the software, and choosing the free account, I was able to access the 3d world. Walking around wasn’t too difficult, though it did take a while to render all the locations. OH! you can be a squirrel.

After playing around for a while, I’m certain this isn’t really the game for me. I never really got why people would go to virtual clubs, drink virtual things, etc., when they can do it in real life. I can’t kill zombies in real life, video games let me do that. But I can go to a bar and talk to a stranger or build a house and have a home.

I realize that there’s fantasy and escapism involved, and that I haven’t played this long enough to truly “get it.” But I’ve always been of the mindset that there’s really nothing in the “real” world you can’t get around or “escape.” It’s just the determination to change things.

But that might be a conversation to be had in the “real” world. Back to my very real, but virtual homework.

So this week we’re covering Customer Relations Marketing. I have to confess, this is one of my more favorite categories. Handling consumers who are already interested in my product is easier than convincing people to like my stuff from the start. CRM is like customer service on steroids. Imagine an old timey country store, where the owner was your personal shopper, who could get you in contact with or get you whatever you wanted. This is the goal of modern, giant corporations, trying to make their large corporation interact with the little customer on a level that is appreciated and works. It takes survey information, social media data, and shopping histories to try and make the purchasing and shopping experience as painless and helpful as possible.

Think Amazon’s 1 touch system, where Amazon will offer you products based on what you posted on Amazon’s Facebook page, return information, and discounts based on what you retweet on twitter.

Is this creepy? I think it’s creepy. Creates sort of the….Wall-E level of dependance. Thoughts?